Dropbox has decided to buy CloudOn, an Israel-based company whose bread and butter consists of providing iPhone and iPad owners with a means of editing Microsoft Word documents in the cloud. The company gained popularity doing this at a time before Microsoft was fully ready to commit to the idea itself. The service worked with a number of cloud storage providers, of which Dropbox was one.

With the acquisition, Dropbox is positioning itself to expand into even more corners of the world. According to The Wall Street Journal, CloudOn's 30 employees will join the company, with the office in Herzliya becoming the base for aggressive hiring in the region. This is both the latest and largest in over a dozen startup purchases Dropbox has made.

CloudOn launched in 2009 and has managed to raise $26 million in funding. It now claims over 9 million users spread across 120 countries, all of whom will have to stop using its service when it shuts down on March 15th.